Every generation thinks the next one lost the plot

The Washington Examiner tells us that Katharine Birbalsingh — celebrated in Britain for running a school of unusually firm expectations — has sounded the alarm: Generation Alpha, she says, will make Generation Z look positively conservative by comparison. I have heard this speech before. I am quite certain it was delivered about my own generation, and about every generation since Adam first complained that his children had no respect for the old ways of the garden.

The complaint is not useless, mind you. Every society owes it to itself to ask what habits it is cultivating in the young. I spent a good part of my life writing for apprentices and tradesmen precisely because I believed that early habits — industry, frugality, honesty in dealing, the discipline of a regular account-book — compound over a lifetime exactly as interest compounds in a ledger. Get the habits right young, and the arithmetic takes care of itself. Get them wrong, and no amount of talent rescues the situation.

But here is where I part ways with the tone of the warning as reported. To say merely that the young are worse than their predecessors, without examining what shaped them, is diagnosis without medicine. The generation being raised today is the first to have grown up with a commercial entertainment system designed, by some of the shrewdest minds and most powerful financial incentives on earth, to capture their attention for profit. I cannot speak to the engineering of these systems — that is beyond my era — but I understand commercial incentives perfectly well, and I know that when someone is paid handsomely to keep a child staring at a screen, the child's civic education is not the primary concern of that business.

The question I would put to the reformers is the one I always put to policy: what does the working household actually experience? A parent working two jobs to meet the rent has little time to supervise what the child studies or watches. A school underfunded and overcrowded cannot easily replicate what Birbalsingh's disciplined institution apparently achieves. The alarm is easy; the structural remedy costs something. Who will pay, and how, and with what accountability? Those are the Franklin questions, and I notice the Examiner's account does not linger on them.

I will say this plainly, because I owe it to honesty: I was not a perfect example to my own family in every respect, and the older I grew the more I understood that a man's public philosophy must be tested against his private conduct. The civic virtues I praised in Poor Richard were not ornaments — they were tools. Frugality so that you are not enslaved to debt. Industry so that your time is your own. Literacy and curiosity so that no one can deceive you cheaply. These are as useful in 2026 as they were in 1736, whatever the medium of instruction.

Here, then, is the counsel I would offer any working parent reading this: do not wait for the generation debate to resolve itself. Sit with your child and read something together — anything with sentences longer than a caption. Open a small savings account in their name and let them watch the balance grow by their own small contributions. Give them a task that has a measurable result. These are not grand reforms; they are the old mechanics of character, and they work at the household level regardless of what the headlines say about generations. The Republic is built, in the end, from households, and the household is still within your reach.